This project within the proposed Center for Population Health and Health Disparities investigates how the built environment and socioeconomic context of neighborhoods and communities affects the mental health of residents independent of their individual socioeconomic position. Understanding the relative importance of environmental/contextual factors versus individual characteristics as determinants of health disparities is fundamental to the development of cost-effective interventions to improve the health of all Americans. No national study in the US has yet investigated this relationship with regard to mental health. This project will be the first national study that includes clinical screening measures for common psychiatric disorders, individual socioeconomic background variables, and measures of the environment. We are interested in whether the objectively measured characteristics of the built environment in communities, which includes physical aspects such as street design, transportation systems, land use, have independent associations with the mental health and psychological well-being of residents, after controlling for the well-established effects of individual characteristics. We extend earlier research of neighborhood context, which has focused on socioeconomic characteristics, by studying factors describing the built (physical) environment. The specific aims of the project are: 1. Create a national level data set that integrates the 1998 and 2000/2001 waves of the HealthCare for Communities survey (HCC) with geocoded neighborhood and community data. This task will interact closely with the Center's Data Core and therefore produce a dataset that will be useful for many additional analyses beyond those proposed here. 2. Analyze the point-in time relationship between mental health and built environment, socioeconomic place factors, individual socio-economic status, and race/ethnicity. Mental health is measured both in terms of specific disorders and by a global scale of good psychological health. 3. Study the dynamic relationship between environmental characteristics and mental health, using the longitudinal subsample of HCC. In particular, we will attempt to specify the extent to which environmental factors predict the incidence of new conditions independent of individual characteristics or lead to better health over time.